Q24N – Due to delegitimization and defamation campaigns by the government of Nayib Bukele, the Salvadoran digital newspaper El Faro moved its administrative and legal structure to Costa Rica.
Founded in 1998, the newspaper claims to be the first exclusively digital newspaper in Latin America ((“El primer periódico digital latinoamericano”).
“Since April 1 of this year, El Faro is administered by the Fundación Periódica, in San José, Costa Rica. Our newsroom will continue in San Salvador and we will continue to do journalism in El Salvador. But our administrative and legal operations will no longer. Now We are a Central American newspaper based in San José. It is the culmination of a process that we undertook a few months ago due to the lack of conditions to continue operating in El Salvador,” the media said Thursday afternoon.
They also denounced physical monitoring and threats to workers; espionage with Pegasus (a spyware developed by the Israeli cyber-arms company NSO Group that can be covertly installed on mobile phones and other devices running most versions of iOS and Android); harassment of advertisers and defamation of officials and legislators of the official party.
For this reason, since 2021 the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) decided to grant precautionary measures to 34 members of the media.
“The criminalization of journalism is, unfortunately, increasingly used by the governments of the region, in parallel with the accumulation of power and the weakening of democratic institutions and civil movements. Autocrats do not tolerate other narratives,” the IACHR report reads.